Payback
by Murasaki Kaida
Summary: She looked at the weak form on the bed and realised that none of the venom in the world could top what had been done this day. Sylaire, SEASON 3 SPOILERS! Non-canon re: season 3.


MISC: This is a NON-INCEST fic – I don't believe Sylar and Claire are related, I refuse to believe it. Angela Petrelli LIES. Beta'd by Despaired_Poet. First time writing a Heroes fic. One line in this fic - Claire's response to Sylar's question about angels dancing on the head of a pin...I saw a similar reply to do with music in a fanfiction a while ago. Just to set the record straight, this is not copying - I just thought the exact same thing.

DISCLAIMER: Don't own Heroes. If I did...well. It would probably just be about Sylar.

* * *

He was staring at the camera - right through the monitor - because somehow, Claire understood, he knew that she was there. His eyes looked red and worn, even on this grainy monitor. They were narrowed and accusing, his thick brows drawn together and his hair in a tangled mess.

She touched her fingers to the screen. Her skin crackled from the static, but she didn't feel a thing. She never could.

On the screen, he hung his head.

Claire clenched her tiny hands into fists.

_There had been Sylar&TheCheerleader, once. The killer who chased the blonde girl through her school in the dead of night. He'd made her heart pound blood into her ears and her lungs burn. He'd made her so afraid that she hadn't been able to run straight. _

_The dark man who'd come to hurt her, who'd driven her into the arms of her hero. The killer who hadn't gotten to her...who had accidentally killed someone else in her stead, but who would forever follow her around like a stain on the skin. A taint on the soul._

Claire sat down and repositioned the monitor to face her squarely. She ignored the presence of Knox behind her and watched the man on the screen watching the camera right back.

_Sylar&TheCheerleader had made sense. She'd trembled and understood. She'd lived for the nightmares she awoke from - the dark, oily eyes that even the shadow of the baseball cap couldn't hide. Because the nightmares made sense. It was completely natural to stare over her shoulder, waiting for the tall dark man to round the corner and stride towards her. Stride with every little bit of confidence and power he had within himself. It was understandable to scream until her throat hurt, because back then, she could still feel pain. And the pain made everything real._

Claire dug a crescent-shaped cut into her palm with her nail and watched the skin snap shut almost immediately. So fast. No feelings. She looked at the security monitor, where he'd begun to rock backwards and forwards. She wondered if he had no pain now, and immediately knew that he did. He could still understand pain, and it made her angry.

Because it made him more human then her.

_TheGhost&Claire had blurred the lines. She could smile, now that Hiro Nakamura had impaled Sylar on his sword. She'd seen him for the first time that night in Kirby Plaza - the killer who had wanted to take her brain and everything that made her Claire Bennett. The killer who had disrupted everything that was Claire Bennet's Life and wasn't content to leave it at that._

_She'd seen two arms, two legs. Eight fingers and two thumbs. Eyes, nose and a mouth. A face that would have been handsome except for the blood from Peter's punches and the look in his eyes. The look of someone who had nothing to give and nothing to lose. _

_He looked exactly human - perfectly human. If anything had scared her that night, it was that Sylar the Killer was human. It was harder to accept that he was the monster who was changing everything when he was just as human as her._

_The monster who was standing right there, facing Peter Petrelli like some twisted Western standoff. And he hadn't looked her way once, not even before Peter went radioactive._

_She should have been concerned for him - her Uncle Peter. Her hero. The man she'd travelled to New York for. She should have walked towards him with the gun and begged for another way long before she actually did._

_But she watched the killer instead. Met his eyes for the briefest flash of fear and something else. Time fell behind the racing of her heart and the lights in his eyes, reflecting the glows from Peter's hands and the lights of Kirby Plaza. It took her only the few seconds it took him to smirk to realise that the something else was familiarity._

_She knew her part. He knew his. They played those parts so very well._

_For a second, his smirk looked like a genuine smile._

_And then he was killed, leaving Peter to almost destroy New York only to disappear with Nathan - her real father, the man she'd imagined so often. A man she'd measured up against her adopted father Noah Bennett many times before she'd even met him and found lacking in comparison. A man who had just helped save New York from his brother, and risked death in the process._

_It should have been normal, in the months following, to mourn Peter. To try and visit Nathan, who was in the severe burns unit at the hospital and not accepting visitors. To try and get on with her life as if the whole orchestrated mess had never happened. _

_She looked over her shoulder all of the time, expecting. Waiting. _

_And found herself disappointed when there was nothing there._

_At night, she dreamed. His dark, spiked hair was flecked with blood and the stubble along his jaw matched the shadow that bathed his eyes. He'd turn towards her, a smooth rotation of broad shoulders and slender hips. He would smirk, but the fear that should have come never did. It was like a replay of a horror movie - a replay of a classic that you grew to anticipate. _

_Be fond of. _

_That smile he'd given her before Hiro Nakamura whirled onto the scene blurred and then became distorted. Some nights it was a cruel display of teeth and gum. Other nights it was an affectionate signal - a meeting of the minds that played out through their mouths and eyes. Promises and dreamscapes and threats, all rolled into a heartbeat of green and brown._

_Sylar wasn't just Sylar anymore - he was The Ghost, the residual traces of a man who'd been obsessed with her - withwhathecouldtakefromher - that wasn't completely her imagination, but was hardly real. _

_Claire couldn't remember her life before Sylar - even when she hissed and clawed at Noah and West about wanting to be normal, wanting to go back to the way things were in Texas. Her tongue was sharp and lined in silver, and she threw her tantrums well. _

_But the truth was, there hadn't been a normal before Sylar. And that was too scary to admit, especially to dear, protective Noah Bennett who would sooner have Sylar ground to dust then accept that little truth. Every time Noah's eyes hardened and the mention and memory of Sylar, Claire felt a little piece of herself break away and disappear. She felt the taint of The Ghost following her around under the watchful eye of her adoptive father and waited for the day that he would realise just how well Sylar had managed to kill his Claire-Bear without even touching her._

_It was wrong. It was so wrong, but her life before The Ghost hardly seemed worth living anymore._

_She wondered, at night when she knew her imagination was going too far, what he'd been like before Sylar&TheCheerleader. If he'd want to go back to that life - that life without the determination to kill her, to violate her brain and her ability without any care for the fact that she was a person. A human being, just like him._

_Just like him?_

_Maybe she was just like him. It was an idea that she moulded_ _into herself when The Company stole from her what she would have given willingly. When Elle used her electricity to blast her and West from the sky. When Mohinder shot Noah and took away the only father she'd ever felt in her heart._

_Claire could be like Sylar, this powerful being who people feared and - through that fear - respected. She was doing a good job, too. It didn't matter that her healing power meant little on the scale of bad-assness. She was fighting the good fight, and she was strong._

_Until it was stripped away from her. First by The Company, and then by Noah. Just like Sylar's was stripped away from him, leaving him a huddled ball in Kirby Plaza._

_She cried and yelled and within her heart, she knew that she'd failed her memory of TheGhost._

He laid on his side on the small cell bed and curled into a fetal position, still rocking himself. His mouth moved in silent patterns Claire couldn't understand, and he looked so small and pitiful in his overlarge grey hoody. Pain blossomed in the pit of her stomach. Not real pain - not the kind of pain she should feel every time someone shot her in the chest or stabbed her beneath the ribs.

It was heart pain, and anger flashed in front of her eyes. Claire wished Sylar had taken her heart pain too. He'd taken everything else, why hadn't he taken her fucking heart pain too?

She wanted to hit him. To slam him in the temple with the butt of her Glock and demand that he buck up. She wanted to enjoy that he was finally feeling a tenth of what she had felt - except that even when her mouth twisted with this thought, she knew that his pain had become boundless in ways she could never understand.

She wanted to find a way to stop feeling for him.

_Sylar&Claire made her the angel flung from heaven, if she could ever argue that she'd been there in the first place. Her nightmares were hazy blurs of skin and looks and laughter, and The Ghost had become little more than a fantasy of a time when her fear had evolved into something more complex. A time when the killer was dead and Claire didn't have to look over her shoulder any more, even though she still did._

_When he returned to her, very much alive, she looked into his face properly for the first time and saw nothing of The Ghost. Claire understood for the first time in months just what her mind had been doing and fear was laced with a strange sense of betrayal and loss. Sylar's smile wasn't affectionate or fond. It told her just as clearly as his words that the only reason she was his obsession was because of her freak genes - the ability he wanted so much._

_He'd betrayed her memory of him. Every time she'd looked over her shoulder had been wasted and it was with this in mind that Claire stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife and tried to run. She tried to run from every mistake she'd made by dreaming of him touching her, smiling at her._

_He pinned her with telekinesis, stumbling towards her like a drunk and he looked so completely undignified that tears sprung up in her eyes. She couldn't even bring herself to resist anymore, because none of this was the 'reality' she'd made for herself. None of it._

_He was just a man. Like always, he was just a man._

_When he cut open her skull and looked at her brain, the tightness in her chest loosened just a little. It wasn't relief, and it wasn't death. She stayed alive when she should have been dead, and all of a sudden, death seemed so beautiful. A way out of the humiliation and the lies. A way out of the bubble she'd lived in ever since Kirby Plaza, and that one look that had never been what she thought it was._

_Sylar taught her, in that one moment, that death had been nothing to be afraid of. It was something to covet, something to worship._

_He gave her something else, another thing tied to him and his memory, to cling to._

_"Why is there evil?"_

Claire looked at the monitor, brushing dyed dark hair behind her ear. She watching him; lying on his side, rocking himself on the cell bed. "How can anyone call themselves good if there's nothing to measure it against?"

_He touched her brain almost tenderly. "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"_

"What music are they dancing to?" Claire whispered, tension creeping into her fingertips when he stopped rocking and lay perfectly still.

_"How do you make love stay?" He breathed, looking at her for the quickest moment, his fingers pausing above her cranium._

Claire swallowed and blinked the film away from her eyes. Knox shifted somewhere behind her, and the muscles in her neck corded. She looked down from the monitor at her small hands, and then back up again.

On the screen, his shoulders slumped. He turned his back to the camera and began rocking again.

_He'd taken everything from her. Her memories - rose-tinted and gilded in gold - her thoughts, her dreams, her ability. Her pain. _

_He broke her. Sylar had taken away the last human thing about her and now, when her wounds snapped shut, she didn't even feel the faintest sting. _

_At first, Claire had thought she was imagining the lack of pain. The trauma of being scalped and then watching him walk out of the door with a smile on his face had to have affected her, and she'd told herself she would be fine. But she knew, somehow, that this was her payback for thinking that Sylar had ever wanted more than spontaneous regeneration._

_He'd plundered her and left her here with the realisation that she was immortal. A girl who faced centuries without pain, without humanity. Without wishes and hopes._

_For the first time in her short life, Claire Bennett wished for death and to die. She wanted him to look surprised and hurt when she found a way to take him to hell with her. She wanted him to regret being Sylar, being The Ghost who never was, being a man who had betrayed her in ways her brain couldn't fully understand._

_Claire Bennett would make him pay._

Claire leant towards the microphone next to the monitor and her finger hovered above the button. Her lips parted, and a gasp of breath came out before she realised that she couldn't translate and unscramble the words that clogged her tongue. She looked at the weak form on the bed and realised that none of the venom in the world could top what had been done this day.

And her heart pain got worse.

_Gabriel&Claire made no sense because it once would have. It was everything TheGhost&Claire should have been, only Sylar wanted to be Gabriel Gray again - wanted to repent, to apologise for all of the fucking things no one could ever apologise for. Every time she beat him down with her acidic words and clawed him with her anger, it was never enough._

_And she hated that he just accepted it all with glassy eyes and clenched teeth, because when he realised he deserved it she knew she might just start to lose herself._

_She experimented in pain, in trying to destroy her body with drink and drugs and gunshots. She always lived, and never had the courage to try the head because part of her was afraid that she'd actually die. He was angry with her for that - this Sylar-Gabriel hybrid. He thought she'd deserved this ability to live forever, thought that she was the only one who understood what it meant to be special._

_She hated him and his opinions. Hated that they said he was her uncle. She didn't want to have the same blood as Sylar, though she could never narrow it down to actual reasons why. When she began working for Arthur Petrelli - her grandfather dearest - he would use the words 'uncle' and 'niece' all of the time, and smile grimly whenever Claire's face pinched with the bitterness._

_Gabriel never got tired of letting Claire whip him with her words, always bore the brunt of her anger with his glassy eyes. And he was there with his strong arms and woodsmoke-scent to hold her when she finally broke. She'd stay that way, unable to deny the comfort even when she knew that this isn't TheGhost, or Sylar. This was someone different, and she still dreamt of him. Every night. And then she would pull away and begin the circle all over again._

_She never meant to get pregnant, and she never intended to tell him. She knew, because she became a snoop, that everything the Petrelli family told her about being related to them was a lie. Her mother sure got around, and Claire soon found out just where her powers came from. She was furious, enraged that she never got to meet Adam Monroe before her 'grandfather' destroyed him, and Gabriel was there when she broke everything in the small space they shared together as 'partners' in the Pinehearst company._

_His dark eyes were worried and his smile was sad when he sad, "We're not related, Claire..." and she felt the mixed relief, anger and pain when she thought of what that meant for her and every facet of Sylar that was real and wasn't real. And when she thought of the one person who could have definitely survived time with her, as her true family, but was now dust._

_Gabriel had that super hearing and he heard the baby's heartbeat long before she had the chance to decide what to do. _

_Harsh words were exchanged. Gabriel fought for the baby's life and Claire hadn't been aware that Gabriel cared enough for any life, having taken many. Her words made tears leak from his eyes, and for the first time since she had met him, Claire saw something very negative in his eyes. Something she'd never wanted aimed at her. It was something that hadn't even been there in place of The Ghost's smile in her memories, at Kirby Plaza. It was something he'd never felt towards her, until she'd decided to take her hatred of him out on their child._

_And she hated that he'd just taught her to hate herself._

Claire bit her lip and stared at the microphone. She wondered if it was on, if she'd pressed the button somehow, and he could hear her heartbeat, because he seemed to be rocking in time to it's pathetic throbbing.

_There was no Sylar&TheCheerleader, TheGhost&Claire, Sylar&Claire or Gabriel&Claire after baby Noah was born. The Bennett family long since gone, Claire had to watch from the sidelines when Gabriel left Pinehearst and his position as a double agent for his mother behind to raise his son without a backwards glance._

_She watched the years go by and Gabriel become the person he would have been without his ability - the ability that drove him to murder and thirst for power. She wanted to carry on murdering people in the name of her fake grandfather, carrying on walking as though she had nothing to give and nothing to lose._

_But she couldn't stop the fact that Noah looked just like her, and that although she never had any proof, she knew that Gabriel watched her just as she watched him. Sometimes, Gabriel looked so sad that she wondered what things would have been like if she'd been able to forgive. To let herself love him like he had once told her he loved her. She'd always told him that she could never forgive him, because she had no physical pain to take away what she felt inside._

_The truth was that the only person she had left to forgive was herself, and she had no idea how to do it._

Claire stared at the monitor, where he'd stopped moving again.

A lot of people had died that day. And looking at this person - this person who had once been a killer, but had found the power to make things right and do something she hadn't been able to do - it suddenly occurred to her that it had been all her fault.

Every last bit of pain Gabriel, his son (THEIR son), even Peter...every last bit of pain they'd all experienced had come back to her and her brimming bitterness. Her anger and her angst. The vicious way she kicked out against the world, because there was no Santa and the grown-ups were just as clueless as she was.

All her fault.

Daphne. Knox.

Noah.

All dead.

She pressed the button next to the mic, tears clouding her eyes when she remembered the bright smile of the little boy she'd seen Gabriel with so often. Remembered the sad look in Gabriel's eyes whenever he smiled back. Her son. Their son. The boy Gabriel had fought so hard to save, who Claire had resented so much. Because she couldn't remember Gabriel ever fighting that hard for her, even though now, she knew he had. With every time he'd accepted her venom, he'd fought for her.

And lost.

"We're so different."

He stiffened, but made no move to turn over.

She took a deep breath to clear her voice of tears. "I remember what you said to me at Pinehearst. About your life. It's strange that...I wish for nothing more than pain, because I don't know what it's like to be human anymore and eternity of this...it sounds unbearable." Her voice broke, and she swallowed. Knox shifted again, and she forced herself to ignore him.

She focused on the form in the cell, willing him to see her. Feel her. "But you...you had so much pain when you were young - all from being human, and you didn't want that anymore. You were happy to be me. And you still can't get rid of the pain." She closed her eyes. Her heart pain bloomed - grew until it swallowed her body whole and made her throat constrict.

Too little, too late.

Everything she'd accused Sylar of taking from her, she'd taken from Gabriel.

Claire felt like she didn't deserve the humanity she'd always wanted. "I can't tell you how sorry I am, Gabriel. I'm so, so sorry." Tears slipped from her eyes - hot tears that made her cheeks flare with shame and regret. Everything she'd done, leading to this moment, had been so blind. So, so blind.

A little life - lost. Along with many others. And the man she'd coveted for so long lay broken in a cell, dying inside just as she had so many years ago. All because of her.

She'd become Sylar, and Gabriel was Claire.

He shifted on the bed - turned his head towards the camera. His voice was hoarse and choked. "You can be happy now, Claire. You led them to our house. You took away my world - my son..." he shook, his voice husking. "You got your payback, Claire. I just hope you know what you've done to yourself, too."

It hurt - almost physical in its intensity. Because the rational part of Claire, buried beneath her fear and anger, knew that Gabriel had never deserved to be paid back for anything. Because none of what he'd done had been his fault. Because he'd spent years trying to repent for something he hadn't even intended to do, only to have it vomited back in his face.

Payback wasn't sweet.

His head drooped down to the pillow, and his body quivered. He curled into himself until he was little more than a ball of dull-coloured clothing on the bed. Claire lowered her head, unable to see, and closed her eyes.

Behind her, Knox left the room and closed the door behind him.


End file.
